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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Thu Sep 23 2010 - 15:55:20 EDT
"War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry": An Interview with Professor
Charles Cantalupo
Efrem Habtetsion, Sep 23, 2010
Charles Cantalupo is a Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative
Literature, and African Studies at Penn State University. He has written
several books on literature including African literature and Eritrean
Poetry. He is also a writer, a poet, a translator, an essayist. and one of
the main organizers of the Against All Odds conference that took place in
Asmara in January 2000. Following is an interview with Professor Charles
Cantalupo on the subject of his new book and his recent visit to Eritrea.
Q: You were in Eritrea this summer and gave a series of lectures to present
your new book: "War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry." What was
that experience like?
C. C.: My book is about contemporary Eritrean poetry, specifically the
poetry that Dr. Ghirmai Negash and I included in the anthology, Who Needs a
Story, published by Hdri in 2005, and a few poems from my documentary film,
Against All Odds: African Languages and Literature into the 21st Century.
Since the two books and the film were distributed by African Books
Collective ( <http://www.africanbookscollective.com/>
http://www.africanbookscollective.com/), their international audience was
assured. But what about an Eritrean audience? It, too, had ready access to
the film and the anthology, but not yet to my new book. Thus I came to
Eritrea this summer to present my work to its primary audience: in Eritrea.
Yet I was retracing a path I had been following for twelve years, beginning
in 1998 with my first translations of Eritrean poetry. Since then, I have
always believed that my writing on or related to Eritrea depended first on
how it was viewed and judged by Eritreans. And this, over the last twelve
years, has been the greatest source of inspiration for my work. Its
credibility depended on the local first, not the global or international,
although that was critically important, too. Do you know the Greek myth of
Antaeus? As long as his feet touch the ground, he has strength. Lift him
up, and he becomes weak. Knowing, touching, feeling the actual place, the
land where poets write, has always inspired my attempts to connect with them
through my writing about their work. Shakespeare and Kipling in England;
Synge and Yeats in Ireland; Dante and Petrarch in Italy - I felt I had to be
there to know them better than if I only read their work on the page. My
writing about poets of Eritrea depends on the same impulse. I am unable to
write about poetry as an armchair traveler.
Thanks to Eritrea's Research and Documentation Center and the Cultural
Affairs Bureau, I gave lectures and workshops about my new book in Asmara,
Keren, and Mendefera.
First I focused on poetry in general, and then on contemporary Eritrean
poetry in particular.
I talked about how to interpret poetry, wherever and whenever it was found,
from ancient times to modern; oral, on paper, or encoded in zeroes and ones
on the internet; and in all kinds of societies around the world - rich,
poor, advanced, developing, north, south, east, west. In short, wherever
there was language, there was poetry, and it consisted of strong images,
revealing metaphors, indomitable rhythms, memorable characters, lyrical
intensity, biographical intrigue, everyday eloquence, meaningful challenges,
compelling conflict, incisive irony, unforgettable language, and more.
Yet I found four major differences between the poetry I knew before 1998 and
what I found in Eritrean poetry after that: its cultural centrality, its
primary orality, its composition in African languages, and its often
unrelenting focus on war, which few forms of contemporary poetry in the
world are now capable of, despite the fact that war still determines much of
contemporary reality.
Everyone who attended my presentations received a copy of Who Needs a Story.
We also left at least half a dozen copies of War and Peace in Contemporary
Eritrean Poetry at each location. And that was a lot of books! I mean that
all of the lectures had a great turnout and they also included lively
question and answer sessions. Each presentation attracted a different kind
of audience, too. In Asmara, many of Eritrea's most important writers and
poets - some of whose work the anthology included - filled the audience at
the Odeon Cinema, and that, I must confess, was a little intimidating.
After all, they are the greatest experts, and I am really only a student of
their work. In Keren, however, the lecture took place at a music school,
and the audience was mostly young people, many of whom were beginning
writers. It felt like one of my beloved poetry classes at Penn State.
Next, at Mendefera, we had the biggest audience of the trip in its elegantly
stylish administrative center. Most of those attending, who were post
graduates, had little previous experience or interest in poetry, and the
challenge I felt was to reveal how poetry is a part of our everyday lives,
even when we might not recognize it: at birth, at marriage, at death, in
music, and even in most of our thinking, which usually employs comparisons
and metaphors to understand almost any issue. Take a visit to the market.
See a pile of oranges and a pile of lemons next to it. One is sweet. One
is sour. Imagine what you'll do with them. This takes us to the verge of a
poem.
At the end of my trip and returning to Asmara, I convened a second poetry
workshop, and it made me wish for more. Or at least I hope it inspired the
dozen participants gathered around a table on the second floor of Cinema
Asmara to hold similar discussions of their own in the future, and maybe
even start a new literary journal for contemporary writers in Asmara, as I
suggested. For several hours we took apart and interpreted three different
poems, sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing, but always enjoying
ourselves and learning new things at the same time. At one point in the
discussion, two sides of the table were practically screaming at each other
- yet all in a great spirit of fiery dialectic and respectful debate - about
what Angessom Isaak really meant by the image of the "chameleon" in his
great poem, "The Colors of Freedom" - perfect! Let the games begin!
Q: Why did you choose War and Peace as the subject of your reflections and
analysis in this new book?
C. C.: One day in the summer of 2002 when I was talking with Zemhret
Yohannes about Eritrean poetry and he was telling me about poets who had
learned their craft writing in the field, he said, "They write a lot...about
war. And yet war isn't only about fighting. And it's not all about death.
That's too restrictive. They write about friendship and the perennial
issues of love and life. War has that, too."
My reading and translating more Eritrean poets for the Who Needs a Story
anthology reinforced Zemhret's observation. When I decided I wanted to
write a book about the anthology, the same remark became the basis, although
I did not quite realize it at the time, for how I titled and organized my
new work.
I found that subjects of war and peace in contemporary Eritrean poetry
comprised a kind of spectrum, with poems that focused almost exclusively on
war at one end, poems seemingly oblivious to war at the other end, and most
poems falling somewhere in between. And thus unfolded the three central
chapters of my book. Returning to the anthology, I identified two poems in
Tigrinya that found war inescapable: Fessahazion's Michael's "Naqra" and
Solomon Drar's "Who Said Merhawi Is Dead?" Similarly in Tigre, Mussa
Mohammed Adem, more than any Eritrean poet in the poems of Who Needs a Story
in any language focused on war to the exclusion of all else. Similarly in
Arabic, an unremitting dimension of war characterized the poems by Mohammed
Osman Kajerai, the oldest poet in Who Needs a Story. At the opposite end of
the spectrum, Tigrinya poems in Who Needs a Story by Saba Kidane, Beyene
Hailemariam, Reesom Haile and Ghirmai Yohannes put war out of sight and out
of mind. Similarly in Tigre, our selection from Mohammed Said Osman
highlighted a poem about unrequited, romantic love and the language of
seduction. And then in Arabic, Abdul Hakim Mahmoud El-Sheikh's poem likewise
devoted itself to love's reflection, albeit "broken." Ensnared to varying
degrees in moments of war and peace, Eritrean poets in Who Needs a Story who
counterpointed the two included in Tigrinya: Meles Negusse, Issayas Tsegai,
Solomon Tsehaye, Angessom Isaak, Ribka Sibhatu, Fortuna Ghebreghiorgis,
Fessehaye Yohannes and Ghirmai Ghebremeskel; in Tigre, Paulos Netabay; in
Arabic: Mohammed Mahmoud El-Sheikh (Madani), Ahmed Mohammed Saad and Ahmed
Omer Sheikh.
Q: Do you really feel there is enough material in the domain of Eritrean
literature to begin producing literary "criticism" on the subject?
C. C.: You know I date the beginning of Eritrean literature to the stele at
Belew Kelew, and how old is that? A lot of literature and orature or oral
literature has come between then and now. Not that we know it all, or even
much of it. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, journalism - Eritrean
literature has it all. There is plenty. I say this with total confidence,
even though I only know the literature, for the most part, through
translation. Yet thus far, we are only scratching the surface, and let me
stress "we" - Abba Isaak Gebreyesus, Ghirmai Negash, Solomon Tsehaye, Tej
Dhar, Jane Plastow, Sandra Ponzanesi, and a new generation is emerging, too,
including Abraham Tesfalul and Dessale Berekhet. There are more I should
name here, too. But this is only the beginning. As I have said, where
there is language there is poetry; there is literature. And Eritrea has
nine languages, which means nine literatures, at least. We have a lot of
work to do. The opportunities for writers and scholars in Eritrean
languages and literatures are innumerable. To take one, amazing recent
example: consider that big new anthology of Tigre stories, poetry, tales,
curses, blessings, and what not that Hdri has published. The book is
monumental and begging for literary critical and scholarly attention.
Still, your question raises an important issue. Where does the doubt come
from that there might not be enough Eritrean literature, or even that it
might not suit the usual purposes of literary study and criticism? I also
ran into doubt when I first had the idea of translating contemporary
Eritrean poetry.
In 1998 when I first heard Eritrean poetry at the Expo festival, I was
amazed and full of admiration for what I heard. My response also included a
desire to try to translate what I heard, a not unusual and even predictable
feeling for a poet and a professor to have.
Nevertheless, when I approached my friend who was a publisher about whether
he would be interested in a book of such translations, he answered, "I would
love to do it, but Tigrinya poetry is tough if not impossible to translate.
All the levels of meanings and wide range of linguistic references might not
carry over, but you could try. Ask the poet himself."
Which was what I did, but not without wondering why translating Tigrinya
might be considered impossible, when nearly every other language in the
world - or at least every language that I had ever heard of - allowed for at
least some kind of translation. Was Tigrinya different? Was that why there
were virtually no translations, except for some early 20th century
renderings in Italian?
A few days later, when I met the poet and asked him, "Has anyone ever
translated one of your poems in Tigrinya," he replied matter of factly, "No.
It would be too difficult. Tigrinya has too much to get across."
Remembering that my publisher friend had been similarly discouraging about
Tigrinya, either I didn't care or didn't believe that Tigrinya was so unique
from other languages that it couldn't be translated. "Still, I'd like to
try," I answered.
Twelve years later, this summer I came to Eritrea for its judgment on the
results: four books, the documentary and some translations of Eritrean oral
poetry, too. The record was far from perfect, yet I never thought it could
be. As I was fairly warned from the beginning, poetry in Tigrinya, yet
poetry in Eritrea's other languages that I have translated, does have
"levels of meanings and [a] wide range of linguistic references.[that do]
not carry over." The poems for translation are "too difficult" and do have
"too much to get across." Still, I would add that I don't know of any great
poems in English or any language for which the same might not be said: the
Sundiata epic, Homer, Dante, Gilgamesh, all the poetry in the Hebrew and
Greek Bible, the Scriptures in Ge'ez, the great Modernist poems of the 20th
century. The list is endless. As is written in Ecclesiastes (12:12), "of
making many books there is no end."
Q: What is the link between the "Against All Odds" conference and this new
publication?
C. C.: The link is direct, yet link to link to link.. The Asmara conference
in 2000 was and still is a defining intellectual moment. The widely
discussed and acclaimed Asmara Declaration, Africa's declaration of language
independence and the conference's greatest outcome, established once and for
all an end to the hegemony of European languages in African poetry.
Yet the declaration's coming out of Eritrea could not have been more
fitting. Consider the collections of Eritrean poetry by Carlo Conti Rossini,
Nefa'e Ethman, Enno Littmann, Jacques Faitloovitch, Johannes Kolmodin in
addition to the poetry written in the field during Eritrea's armed struggle,
and after it by poets included in the anthology, Who Needs a Story as well
as individual volumes by poets before and after the publication of the
anthology. The Asmara Declaration for Eritrean poetry and most of Eritrean
literature and culture in general was almost a kind of redundancy or a
stating of the obvious. They already embodied the substantial portion of
the ten points that, to recall the worlds of the declaration itself, sought
to "affirm a new beginning by returning to its languages and heritage."
"Speaking for the continent," "[t]he vitality.equality..[and] diversity of
African languages," their "dialogue," their "translation," their
accessibility in primary education, and their use in "research" and
"development" - all of this had already been happening in Eritrea and had
always been happening in Eritrean poetry. Furthermore, it predated other
famous calls for African languages to be primary in African poetry: for
example, Ngugi's Decolonising the Mind in 1986; his call for abolishing the
department of English at the University of Nairobi in 1968; and Obi Wali's
essay in 1963, "The Dead End of African Literature." Eritrean poetry had
never reached such a "dead end." It had never turned into European
languages as so many other poetries around Africa had done. Poetry in
Eritrean languages was always there, again like that stele in Belew Kelew.
Thus, writing War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrea Poetry seemed like the
next logical step after doing the anthology, Who Needs a Story. As I say in
the introduction to my new book, I wrote it as a kind of reader's guide to
the poems in the anthology. This is hardly a new idea. "Reader's guides"
exist for many writers and kinds of literature: Yeats, Wallace Stevens,
Chinua Achebe, Chinese poetry, literary theory.you name it. I have added
another. A more prosaic title than what I chose could be "A Reader's Guide
to Who Needs a Story." But then again, a reviewer of my book suggested yet
another title: "Who Needs A Story? - The Commodity: Literary and Critical
Production in a Global Literary Market." My book's first chapter and its
"reprise" focus a lot on that, too.
Q: Do you think this book illustrates somehow the importance of being
published for African literatures and African languages?
C. C.: I hope so. Writers want to communicate: to be read, to be written
and talked about, and to be taken seriously. There has been doubt - to go
back to that devilish word we have already mentioned - and even despair that
literature in African languages could accomplish this. Would there be
enough readers? Enough or even any opportunities and resources for
publication? Again, Eritrea and a few other African countries have been an
exception to this rule, but they have not disproved it throughout most of
the rest of Africa and beyond.
The Asmara Declaration grappled with this problem in theory. Who Needs A
Story put the theory of the Asmara Declaration into practice. In my case, I
approach the problem not as a writer in an African language, obviously, but
as a translator and a "Non-Native Speaker," which is the title of my poem
with which I end the new book.
Frankly, my book among others is confronting a failure of translating
African language literature that derives first from a failure to recognize
the primacy of African languages for African literature, the Asmara
Declaration notwithstanding. I love and always will love great African
literature in my native tongue, English. It's beautiful. What's not to
like? English would be significantly less without it. I don't consider
African literature in English or other colonial languages and African
literature in African languages to be an either/or proposition. There is
room in the world for both: more and more room, I would argue, and not less
and less as some say. Nevertheless, African literature exists primarily in
African languages. Think of all there is; all there must be. It dwarfs
whatever appears in colonial languages. How could it not? Still, African
literature that is translated amounts to even less than what exists in
colonial languages. Of course, we should be careful about projecting the
stereotypical image of Africa as a catastrophe due to a lack of development
or waste of natural resources onto Africa's language resources. They
flourish, despite the widespread critical and scholarly timidity about
acknowledging that if African literature is to thrive and prevail then its
literary translation is a necessity - a point, I should add, that applies to
the literature of any continent or country.
To bemoan the failure in literary studies to translate African language
writing unfortunately buttresses the unthinking representation of modern
Africa as an ongoing catastrophe. Yet the best remedy for such widespread
misunderstanding is precisely the translation of more African language
writing. Otherwise, Africa is not only unread - to speak of the thousands of
writers in all genres who write and remain untranslated in indigenous rather
than colonial languages; Africa is misread: with the most widely recognized
African writers, who are far fewer in number, using colonial languages for
their work.
In the case of my own book, I stated in the first sentence of my "Foreword"
that to discuss the entire contemporary poetry of most if not all countries
required more than a book, and Eritrea was no exception. But a lot of
publishers disagreed that Eritrea was an exception, and I have the rejection
letters to prove it. They said that my topic was too narrow, too
specialized. What? Did I think a little country like Eritrea deserved a
book about its poetry as if it was Ireland or Greece? As a matter of fact I
did, I wrote back in an imaginary email to every rejection. One
longstanding editor of an American university press that is internationally
distinguished for what it publishes about African literature even
recommended that I should seek an Ethiopian publisher. That could be fine,
of course, if a little unlikely, but it reminded me of people who think
Ukrainians might as well be called Russians. I know first hand that
Ukrainians don't like this, to put it mildly, because my heritage is half
Ukrainian. Regardless, I could not find an American or European publisher
who would publish my book, whatever the reason and, of course, there are
many more than what I have mentioned. Anxious and depressed that my
manuscript would never be published, which is always a possibility, if I
didn't write to Justin Cox of African Books Collective to ask if he had any
suggestions, and if he didn't recommend Mkuki na Nyota and its publisher in
Dar es Salaam, Walter Bgoya, who clearly believed - to get back to your
question - in the importance of being published for African literature and
African languages, you and I might not be having this conversation. In
response to my proposal, he replied that he had already been planning to
publish a series of poetry books, and he thought that a book about
contemporary poetry in Eritrea with, in his words, its "rich cultural
patrimony," could be an important addition to the list. Such a wonderful
response - it still feels like a dream come true.
Q: Finally, what do you think has been the impact of these collaborative
endeavors as to the place of Eritrean literary productions in the world
today?
C. C.: Thank you for using the word "collaborative." What bends and forges
the links we have discussed between "Against All Odds," the Asmara
Declaration, the conference documentary, Who Needs a Story, War and Peace in
Contemporary Eritrean Poetry and the best that is yet to come but the spirit
and the action of collaboration? The acknowledgements at the beginning of
my new book take several pages. They tell a story in itself. Yet in answer
to your question, please allow me to quote some lines from the second to
last page of my new book's last chapter, which takes the form of a poem.
They apply specifically to Who Needs a Story, but more generally they could
describe the feeling I have had in writing about Eritrea since my first
visit in 1995. Here I have never felt "like an author writing a book in /
Private" but instead
like one person in a Renaissance workshop
Doing my part on a massive painting, only the subject
Was war and peace in the Eritrean struggle to survive,
Pictured in two local and two global languages worked on
Over and over by many people's hands into poems.
Google the words "Eritrea, poet, poem, poetry" or some such combination, and
the results will include many critically distinguished literary journals,
websites, books and anthologies. But when Google was founded in 1997, it
would have found close to nothing. Not that there wasn't a lot of Eritrean
literature to be found, as well as some writing about it but, to use your
phrase, the "collaborative endeavors" of writers, scholars, critics and
publishers for it to be recognized and heard or read were not as evident as
they are now. Nor were translations. Yet if our current efforts are to be
considered successful and to continue to have an "impact," to use your word,
what I am saying about 1997 will have to be said about 2010 - the ten-year
anniversary of the Asmara Declaration - in 2020, the twentieth anniversary.
By then I expect we will have published new translations of contemporary
short stories from several Eritrean languages and traditional Eritrean oral
poetry. Translations of the history books of Alemseged Tesfai and the
novels of Beyene Haile should also be in print. African Books Collective as
well as other online booksellers like "Abe" and "Amazon" should also be
selling translations of novels by other Eritrean writers and individual
collections by Eritrean poets. By 2020, we should also see - and I hope my
War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry encourages this - databases
like the MLA International Bibliography, JSTOR, ProQuest, Project Muse and
others brimming with more critical and scholarly writing about Eritrean
literature and oral poetry. And let's not forget what is all important: that
such works continue to be published in exemplary and affordable editions in
their original languages by Hdri, the premier source of Eritrean literature
and an example that other African nations should follow.
Thank you so much Professor Charles Cantalupo for sharing your thoughts
with us.
C Copyright 2001-2009 Shaebia.org
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